historicallinguist

The thing is that accent is probably the only thing the ESL folk could take issue with. I am a domestic student, grew up in the U.S., and studied in the U.S. and U.K. What else could she possibly take issue with besides accent? I am not quite sure what you mean by ESL test of oral variety. Could you please explain it?

I both studied in an English-speaking High school and two colleges, and also grew up in an English speaking country. But again, I get targeted.

Hi. Fuzzy. Thank you so much for your advices. Actually I should clarify several background information. First of all, I am not even an international student. I am actually a domestic American student (with minority name and ethnicity). I feel discriminated because I am the only one domestic student (as far as I know) of the incoming class with a name that is associated with a certain ethnic group, and I am the only domestic student singled out for this test. So, basically, every other domestic student is exempted, and I am the only one targeted. Second, I am actually going to spend only one year in this program (this is an MA program), because my deferment request for the Ph.D. acceptance from another university (the one I mentioned to you in PM before) was successful. Oh, you reminded me of not going outside the department. This is so important!! I was about to go to higher administration (as I did in the past, but not sure which one) when I was writing the original post. It sounds like that I should first go to the chair of the department and talk with her about this issue. You are right that I do want to avoid alienating people as I did in the past. That is why I thought twice and came here to ask advices about what to do before I go to some higher administration. I do want to avoid alienating any of the advisors (including the chair who will be one of my advisors). So, I actually focused the issue on the ESL director and her behavior (The whole thing seems to be orchestrated by the ESL folk, because of low enrollment in many of the ESL classes (less than 3 enrolled, I checked online. So, if they cannot get at least 5 students, these classes are going to be cancelled.)). This person, of course, will by no means serve as my advisor, because she does not even have a Ph.D. I also asked some graduate students who studied here more than 1 year. They told me that picking out minority students to fill out the seats of ESL classes and solve the problem of low enrollment happened before (Of courses, some of these folks are in a bit different situation, because they are international students). Fuzzy, you may also wonder why I am opposing this single test so much. The test in itself has little importance, to be honest, and, if it is just a test, I could just take it and easily pass it. What I am really concerned is what is after the test. So, basically, if one takes the test and if one does not have a perfect score (which is unlikely in any event, because of the perceived conflict of interests), based on the information on their website, one will be required to take at least 1 ESL class per semester, by paying an extra fee, and such class will be shown on the transcript. The transcript thing is something that really disturbs me and could potentially do me a permanent damage in my academic record.

So, now I am starting my new term in a graduate program in University X. But I recently received a letter saying that I got to take ESL tests as a duty for the TA job (the term has not yet started). I am singled out because they said they found me having experiences living in multiple countries. But actually I knew that they singled me out because of my name that suggests that I am of a certain national origin. I told them I am a native speaker of English and another language (let's name it language X). The chair then sent me to the director of the ESL program, and the chair said the director would decide. When I was meeting with the ESL director, as soon as I sat down and just started chatting with her, she then said I had some accent of language X, and therefore she insisted that I take the test. But the thing is she fully understood what I was saying without any problem. Then, I raised this point to her. Then, she said, oh, maybe you can do well in one-on-one situation but you can not do presentation in front of a group of students.(Are you kidding me?) The tricky part of this test is that there is no grading rubric whatsoever. And unless you get a perfect score (I do not think many of our fellow native speakers of English can get that perfect score, and that really depends on the mood of the graders), you got to pay extra fees and take their ESL classes. I checked their enrollment now, and there are so few people enrolled that the classes are going to be cancelled. I know this is why this person is pressing me to take the test and the she will have a good reason to make me pay and take the ESL class which is a waste of time. The university rule says nothing about requiring to take this test based on accent. So, in this situation, what should I do? Should I reach out to Labor Union, Ombudsman, departmental chair, or dean of the college, or a combination of these people? I feel that I am discriminated based on national origin.

OOPS. Totally did not realize that. But good to know.

Just some rough suggestions. It sounds like you are doing sociolinguistics. First of all, you need to have some good ideas about some sociolinguistic theories and models, and then choose one to apply to your data, if applicable. Second, you need to better define your data set. Based on your description, it is way too vague and it is hard to tell what exactly is your object (or patient) of research. Besides that, you will need to also focus on one or two linguistic phenomena of the specific set of data you want to deal with. For example, you cannot simply say that you want to compare the language(s) of youngsters and elders. A better (but maybe not the best) hypothetical question may be asking how the usage of quantifier raising (or many other phenomena such as island constraints, you name it) differs between youngsters and elders in English speakers of city X.

If I am not wrong, MCGILL AND UCONN DO NOT REQUIRE GRE.

I am second to this. 3.6 is around the threshold for being able to be considered for admission, and it is by no means a high GPA.

How about political economy along the theory of Marxism? I was not and am not a sociology major, but I did some readings in Marxism, and I found its political economic theory quite easy for a non-major to get into.

Yes. Msc is a one year program. Whether the degree offered there is useful for you depends on which tutor you have been assigned to. I heard good stories in department of education at Oxford, and that is why I am letting you know this possibility. Generally speaking, if your assigned tutor has a good track of publications appropriate to his/her stage of professional career, is a fellow of some college (preferably some colleges with better financial support for their fellows and students, such as Balliol College and St.John's College, rather than tiny colleges or PPHs that constantly struggle with financial issues), and is a full-time faculty with a title of either XXX Professor or University lecturer, this person will likely to be helpful for you to graduate from the program with a good thesis that you could use it later as a writing sample for various purposes, and write you good LOR for your applications for jobs/PHD programs in the future. If your assigned tutor is a short term contract-based part time departmental lecturer, then decline the offer, because departmental lecturer is generally over-loaded with tons of students, both undergraduate and graduate, to tutor, and therefore can pay very little attention to each individual student.(and that translates to very few contact hours to meet with you for your research project and tutorials). You will have an idea who will be your tutor when you receive your offer from the department. If not, you can always email the department and ask. Great. Now you narrowed down your research area. Say more about L2 Acquisition. Explain why L2 acquisition is interesting not only to you but also to your intended audience, and what your intended audience can learn from this proposed research project. As for your final point, I guess it is still too broad. It is broad because the very notion of learning another language is very general. It would be helpful if you could narrow your object of investigation down to the L2 acquisition of phenomenon X in language Y by speaker of language Z. For example, L2 acquisition of argument structure in English by Spanish speaker would be a much more specific (feasible within the timeframe of a master program too) object of investigation. Also, the easiness to learn a second language is not only dependent on your teaching methods, but also a variety of factors such as the first language background of the learners, whether the two languages share a writing system, etc. So, a better formulated question may be how, ceteris paribus, proposed method X is more efficient than old method Y to teach the phenomenon Z in language A as a second language to speaker of language B.

Oh I see. Now I understand. Then, it is a totally different story. It sounds like both you and your family have good will to help each other, and such good will is also mutual. Regardless of the consequences of such good will on each party (i.e. being non-consequentialist), I think the good will is such that it truly makes a difference here.

I was in the similar situation where you are in now. I had a non-linguistics BA in two specific languages and their related area studies. GPA is not something you can change, and not the most important thing for admission. GRE is like a threshold. You need to be above certain scores for consideration of university-wide fellowship. But when it comes to admission, GRE is not the most important thing. I guess you need to think more specifically and then articulate in you SOP what question you are interested in in a more precise way. You said you wanted to do applied linguistics, with a focus on L1/L2 acquisition. But L1 acquisition is something quite different from L2 acquisition, and vice versa. Exactly which one are you interested in investigating? Suppose you want to deal with L1 acquisition. You will need to briefly discuss in your SOP whether you want to deal with the acquisition of phonology, or syntax, or something else. Also, L1 acquisition, whether it is theoretical or applied, generally involves some kind of experiments. You may want to also include in your SOP a brief discussion your proposed experimental methods, proposed target group of native speakers in this proposed experiment, and so on and so forth. Generally, it varies from school to school when it comes to whether someone with a non-linguistic BA could get into a masters program for (applied) linguistics. You may also consider programs in School of Education (SoE) in various universities. It seems that programs in SoE rather than programs in a general linguistic department can better serve you for your interests in L1/L2 research, or language teaching. You did not mention whether full funding is a necessary condition for you to attend graduate school. If not, then I have two suggestions for you: 1. Department of Education, University of Oxford 2. Teacher's College, Columbia University. If I remember it right, the one in Oxford does not require GRE. Either way, these two programs are fairly easy to get into without funding (or in some cases, with a small scholarship of, say, 3000 pound, or 2000 dollar). 1 is cheaper than 2 in terms of price, because 1 is a one year program but 2 is a typical 2 year US. program.

I am in a similar boat. But I did something different from what you did. I just honestly tell them where I am from, and more importantly let them know I am proletarian. I guess when you are more openly talk about your problems in a sincere way, there are generally two types of people: 1. those who are quickly tired of your stories and problems 2. those who are interested in listening and/or willing to help if possible. You can quickly identify who may be more suitable for you to continue to hang out more often and know more about each other in this way. You willed to loan the money to your family rather than spending that money in buying things for yourself. This means that you exercised your free will to take this action to help your sister, giving priority to help others in stead of yourself. This is a case of altruism. I guess your essential problem is not that you do not have the money to buy the things you window shopped. You did have the money. If you had not had loaned the money to your family, you could have used that money to buy the things you window shopped. The essential issue here is that you gave priority to the happiness of your family rather than to your own pleasure. That was your choice. But now you somehow regret your choice because as a result of your altruism to your family you cannot enjoy the shopping that you could have enjoyed. How to solve this problem? Well, switch your priority if you can will to do so. You may say you have the moral obligation to help your sister out. But honestly speaking, not matter from Aristotelian ethics (reason over emotion) , deontological ethics (rationality as basis of morality), utilitarianism (maximization of utility), contractualism/contractarianism (mutual agreement), it is hard to justify that it is morally required to give priority to your family over yourself, unless you are simply altruistic, and choose to exercise your free will to help at the cost of your own happiness. For example, you said that you parents did not support you for your college career in a substantial sense. Then, ask yourself why you should support them for the EFC that they are supposed to contribute, and why you should take the responsibility of theirs. Is there any social contract going on here? If so, what kind of social contract? If no social contract at all, isn't it unfair to even ask you to contribute, regardless of whether you are opulent or are eking out a living? Based on your description, I also feel that your family members are trying to take advantage of (i.e. exploit) you. They did not financially support you for many years yet ask you for financial support for their own problems. Isn't this a text-book definition of exploitation (i.e. giving out little and then demanding a lot back)? Given that you are now self-supported and can make a living with your stipend, AND given that your family can barely support you for anything, it may be better for you to distance yourself from your family, or simply quit from it and cut whatever ties you may have with them. After all, a family is not unlike other social institutions such as a school, a company, etc, and you should have the right to quit if you are treated unfairly in such a social institution. A detailed discussion of family as a social institution can be found in this book: The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (published in 1884). So, if you have time, take a look at this book, and you will have a better idea what family is all about.

Oh No! I didn't!

In addition to what Fuzzy and Mystic said, I would say that one way to narrow down your options of potential research topics is to ask whether you want to deal with syntax, phonology, semantics, or the interface of any two of these three areas as it is relevant to English or Arabic or both. General language description or sociolinguistic description for a language, whether it is Arabic or English, is too broad as a topic for a MA thesis. Second, you said you wanted to deal with English and Arabic data. This is also really a very broad set of data to deal with. It may be helpful for you to specify what kind of Arabic and English data you are interested in investigating. For example, are the Arabic data you want to investigate classical Arabic, or Colloquial Arabic spoken in country X? You will also need to tell your potential audience of the thesis why you would like to compare specifically, say, variety Y of Arabic and variety Z of English. What are the generally theoretical implications derived from such comparison? The mere fact that you have access to the speakers of variety Y of Arabic and variety Z of English is not a sufficiently good argument for you to justify why you would like to carry out such a project. I guess there must be some phenomena you found in these two respective varieties of the two languages that propel you to consider carrying out such a project. So, I guess for now the first step for you is to formulate some sort of rationale to justify the purpose of the project.(which can also be used as part of the introduction and abstract of your thesis). Finally, you will need to also think about the methodology of your thesis. Is your project experimental or theoretical or the both in nature? Whichever it may be, one important issue you need to consider is whether it is feasible within the timeframe of the MA program. Also, given that you are essentially doing a data-driven sociolinguistic project for an MA program, it is unlikely to you will be able to compare a number of different theoretical frameworks, and discuss thoroughly their strengths and weaknesses. So, it may be better for you to pick one theoretical framework to work in with your data from variety Y of Arabic and variety Z of English. You can acknowledge at the end of your thesis that the analysis you develop within theoretical framework X is one possible analysis for data A, B, and C, and other analyses within theoretical frameworks Y and Z for data A, B and C may also be equally valid, and you will leave that to future research etc. That way, you can avoid doing the MA thesis forever without completing it.

I saw in previous threads that some programs only admit one or two students per year. Suppose Ph.D Program X in Academic year Y admitted only Student Z. How is Z going to do his/her coursework given that Z is the only person for the class? Will Z take cross-listed classes not specifically designed for Z's program X such as upper division undergraduate classes? Or will Program X offer one-on-one classes for Z throughout the coursework phase of Program X? Any one has any idea?

I guess Europe in this sense concerning free tuition does not include the U.K.

Depending on what kind of sociolinguistics you want to do in graduate school, your options in the UK may vary. If you want to do variationist sociolinguistics, U of Edinburgh is likely to be your place. For your second question, a quick answer would be "No, very unlikely". UK government generally provides financial support (more specifically, generally in the form of governmental loans) for UK/EU student, while overseas students including American students would be expected to pay higher tuition and fees (under the category of overseas student) by their own means, unless the school that accepted you somehow is willing to fund you in one form or another (partial scholarship, bursary that covers fees but not tuition, small travel grants in support of your fieldwork related to your research project, etc). Full funding to study in a UK university generally not comes from the UK university where you will study. Rather, it is generally from external funding organizations, and in order to get that, you will have to file separate applications (just like you applied for Fulbright.) Depending on how you compare a UK program with a US program. First, UK program is much shorter. A UK master generally takes about 9-12 months to get. So, if you compare what you pay for a master program of 9-12 months in the UK with what you pay for a master program of two years in the US, UK program is much cheaper. However, you will also need to notice that this comparison is based on the assumption that Program X in the UK and Program Y in the US are both unwilling to fund you. This assumption could be wrong. A U.S. program could possibly give a tuition waiver, or stipend for TAship, or both. So, I would recommend that you apply to UK schools as your safe schools. They are generally unable to fund you, but able to offer you admission without funding, or with partial funding, say, a scholarship of 3000 GBP. Second, be cautious who will be your tutor, before you accept an offer from a UK university. If not specified, do email the department and ask. Your tutor is likely to be the only person who will be able to write LOR if you applied to PHD programs somewhere else. Lecturers in the UK just lecture, and they won't grade your works. Your works will be marked anonymously by both internal and external examiners. Your tutor will probably be the only person who looked at your practice works and provide you feedbacks throughout the academic year, and he/she will likely to serve as your thesis supervisor (but again your thesis will not be marked by your tutor, and will be anonymously marked by both internal and external examiners). But at least, your tutor will have some ideas of your work, and therefore be in a position to write your LOR. So, when you receive an offer from a UK university, ask yourself whether you will likely to continue to work with this person beyond the master thesis and do your PHD dissertation work with this person. If not, could you have two other LORS from your undergraduate institution to support your planned Ph.D. application after another, say, half year, in addition to the previous gap years you had? I guess the issue of LoR is a very important thing you need to consider for now, if you do want to go to the U.K. to do your master. Finally, your description of your interests sounds like East Asian studies departments could better serve your interests. In particular, your interests sound a good fit for University of Southern California. So, do check out their website, and see how you feel about their department. Funding in USC is generous, if you could get into it. So, don't miss this opportunity!

Professional LORs from your bosses are rarely helpful for graduate admission to a nonprofessional advanced degree whose admission depends on pretty much your academic preparation and suitability rather than work experience (Professional advanced degrees are degrees such as MBA, JD, MD, etc.). I would recommend that you ask for an LOR from your mechanical engineering professor, because this person could say a lot about your mathematics background that is one of the important qualifications the admission committee of the MS program is likely to look for. For the Sanskrit/Classics Prof. you mentioned, it depends. First, I am not sure whether the Sanskrit/Classics Prof. is a philologist or a linguist. You said this Sanskrit/Classics Prof. also had some experience in NLP. What exactly did he do in the field of NLP, and how is his experience in NLP relevant to the coursework you had with him? If you can figure out some sort of connection between his experience in NLP and how his experience in NLP is relevant to your classics coursework, do ask him for an LOR. If not, I would say he is less ideal.(But of course, life is not perfect, and sometimes we have to take advantage of whatever is available even if it is not ideal). I do have one other question about the classics class you took with this person. I took classics class when I was an undergraduate. Based on what I know about classics, a classics class could mean quite a number of very different things. Is your classics class a translation class of classics texts, or a classics literature in translation class, or a comparative philology class, or something else? Finally, I would strongly recommend that you ask another from an engineering professor instead of your foreign language professor. Here is why. First, what can a foreign language professor say about you as a student? If he/she says something positive about you, he/ she may say something like the following, XXX is very good at XXXX language. XXX is a very hard working student dedicated to studying the XXXX language and XXXX culture. XXX is good at reading in XXXX language, having good conversational skills in XXXX language. etc. So, here is the problem. Whatever the foreign language prof. has to say about you has very little to do with whether you will be successful in a computational linguistics program. Furthermore, in some cases, a foreign language prof., especially if this prof. is trained in education rather than linguistics, could possibly miss the point of what grammar is in linguistics, and mistake pedagogical grammar as grammar in linguistic sense. I guess this could potentially do you a disservice. So, try to avoid it and ask another engineering Prof. instead. The emphasis of the LOR from engineering Profs, in my opinion, should focus on your problem solving skills, mathematical background, and your potential to do research in computational linguistics in the future. If possible, try to also ask your engineering Prof. to relate in the LOR your undergrad research experience in engineering to your academic goal as a computational linguist. (For instance, how your undergrad research experience prepared you to do computational linguistics, and how the undergrad experience inspired you to extend your horizon to another field, etc)

UW at Seattle also has a very good MS program for computational linguistics. You can definitely take a look at this one. I was from a non-CS, non-linguistics background, and applied to/will be studying in a theoretical linguistics program this fall. I applied for two application seasons two years ago and last year. One very important experience I have to say is that do not emphasize your skills in pedagogical grammar of specific languages/however many languages you know/studied, because it looks like emphasizing these will do you little service, if not disservice at all, to get admission and funding. I did my first round of application by emphasizing my knowledge in multiple foreign languages, and I was literally get rejected by EVERY linguistics department that year. Then, I reapplied, and switched to focusing my SOP on my academic interest in specific sub-field of linguistics, rather than saying something general about my knowledge as a polyglot/about knowing however many languages. This time worked, and I got accepted with funding.. I think GPA and GRE are NOT the most important elements that will determine whether you can get admission and/or funding. They are like threshold. GRE and GPA will matter, not so much for the department (and the ADCOM), but more for university-wide competition that is beyond the purview of what the department can decide. According to your description of your GPA and GRE, they are already above the threshold. So, not so much to worry about these two. I think your focus now should be on SOP and writing sample, as these two things are going to substantially determine whether you get a deal from the admission committee or not. Finally, instead of saying HOW you get your linguistics knowledge outside your undergraduate curriculum, a more fruitful approach to improving chances of getting offers would be concentrating on formulating some kind of specific questions in your SOP that interest you, and tell the admission committee why these questions are both interesting and important, how you would like to answer these questions in the future, what theoretical frameworks you would like to work in/on, what are some of the potential deficiencies of the theoretical frameworks you propose to work in/on, how to ameliorate the deficiencies, if any, of the current frameworks. Last but not least, do tell how the admission committee how their curriculum, and faculty members can contribute to your research agenda. After all, you want to find a place that not only offers you admission and funding, but also a place that is the most nurturing for your academic development.

First of all, I could talk about only things I studied. I talked about your book in the previous threads because I have some knowledge of the book, and of Korea in general. I did not study Syrian and/or other Semitic languages, and therefore it would not be appropriate and qualified for me to talk about these things that I never studied. One major ground I have to suggest that this book was politically motivated is the conflict of interest between the author and the North Korean regime. The author is clearly in conflict against the regime, and the regime is against her. There is no doubt about this. So, think about it. If you are describing some entity E, which you hate it very much, would you think that you would be able to judge E without prejudice? I do not think so. Because of conflict of interests, I think the author should have recused herself from making judgments about the regime, and the regime should also recuse itself from making judgments about the author, because either judgment (from either direction) would not be expected to come out as fair without prejudice. But the reality is that the author did come out with a book that presents not much herself as a person (or refugee) as an arraignment (or to some extent, a rant) on how terrible the regime is. Then, does this book worth reading? Yes, but read with caution and be aware of the personal prejudice of the author against what she is trying to present. If you review some of the book-reviews of this book, you would also find that some reviewers judge this book as "simplistically written", but thinks that this is book is valuable because it is a documentation of the human rights violation of the DPRK regime. I beg to differ. Whereas this book is some kind of documentation, I would question whether it is an accurate and unbiased documentation. Besides all these problems related to conflicts of interests and likely biases associated with such conflicts, I would also point out that a huge chunk of this book appeals to pathos. If you will, put aside whatever emotions you may have when you read the book, re-read it like a justice sitting in a court hearing a case, ask analytical questions in the sense of analytical philosophy about some of the issues she presented. I can assure you that, if you do these, you will find inconsistencies of various kinds in this book, and therefore conclude that this book is not as non-fictitious as it claims to be, and also concur with me that this book is inadmissible as evidence against the regime (Of course, this is not to deny that some other independent evidences outside this book may serve as evidences against the regime for its human right records). Thus, I would say that this book is a mixture of reality and (wishful) imagination. As you said, it is very hard, if possible at all, for us to verify many of the things she had to say about the regime. I agree with you. In this sense, it is fair to say that the truth-value of many of her propositions are unknowable, because we have no way to map her expressions to the external reality of the world we are living in. If that is the case, these of her statements are cognitively meaningless because they can neither be verified analytically nor be verified empirically. Then, what is the difference between these statements by the author, and the famous sentence coined by Chomsky "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which is syntactically correct but semantically meaningless?

I concur. In particular, housing in NYC is VERY VERY VERY expensive!

I studied some Korean (pedagogical grammar and language use) before, and I know quite a bit about the North Korean refugees. Based on what I know about the memoir you mentioned by Eunsun Kim, I think that many of the claims and their supportive facts laid out in this book are highly questionable, and it is a book that is highly politically motivated.(to some extent, unilaterally biased). While it is undeniable that there are some factual elements laid out in this book, some parts of this book are certainly fictitious, and are stories that the author was politically motivated to tell, and still, for some other parts of this book, it is very difficult to tell whether what the author said is the factual description of what she experienced, or is merely her imagination, because there is no way for us to verify the truth-value of what she said for these parts either way. So, I would recommend that, when reading this book, one has to read it very critically and carefully, and refrain from automatically taking the claims and descriptions in this book as factual without further verifying whatever the author said.

Based on my personal experience, practical skills in a specific language are unfortunately neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to get in to a funded linguistics program in the U.S. or elsewhere, except the case that you are applying to a language-specific linguistics program located within East Asian Studies (or Oriental Studies) rather than a theoretical linguistics program located within a linguistics department. If you do want to study in a language-specific linguistics (in your case, I assume it is Chinese and/or English), then generally there are a large amount of components that are about translation of both linguistic texts and other texts between the non-English target language and the English language, and about language use rather than about linguistic theories. In this case, you may have to sacrifice some opportunities of studying linguistic theories so as to focus on the sociolinguistic of a specific language and the sociolignuistic interaction between this specific language and another specific language. There are actually not many options of schools in Hong Kong. Doing a Master in Hong Kong, I am afraid, is not a particularly good idea. The issue at stake here is the quota some professors in some Hong Kong universities impose to determine how many students can get good grades and distinction. I have been told that distinction is granted so rarely that in many cases a whole faculty (or department) does not have even one student graduating with distinction and has 1 or 2 students graduating with distinction. This means that, if you apply for a Ph.D. in the field, the efforts you made for your coursework in the Master's program in Hong Kong being equal, the grades you obtained there could potentially do you a disservice. Besides the issue of tough grading associated with pre-determined quota, a typical Master's program in Hong Kong would have much less hand-holding compared with those in the U.S., and I would expect that you would get less attention from your professors if you study in Hong Kong, because the class size there is generally much larger than that of a typical graduate level class in the U.S.. That said, there is one advantage of studying in Hong Kong. Tuition is much cheaper in Hong Kong. But the lower tuition may come with a cost of quality. Finally, I would say that the chance to get full funding (if they grant full funding at all) in Hong Kong is much lower than getting one in the U.S. U.K. has plenty of them. But the aforementioned issues I said about Hong Kong universities are also applicable to many of the British Universities, probably with the exception that British universities are not going to set a quota to determine your final classification. They even have 9 month masters programs. You could certainly try to apply. The likely scenario when you apply to a UK university for financial aid is that you will have some small grants but a main chunk of tuition and maintenance fees will have to be paid on your own. For the first question, I would say at least 6-7. For the second question, there is no answer, because whether you get into a program will depend on not only your own merits but also the candidate pool of that year for that school, which no one knows for now.

I am not sure whether this is an essential reading for linguists. The OP was asking for books a linguist must read, and I am afraid that a literary work such as the one you mentioned is more suitable for a literature class than for a linguistics class.